Tag: Afghanistan

Afghanistan doesn’t present the kind of “false choices” that President Barack Obama, by nature, habitually rejects. The choices are real and awful, and no amount of reframing and rephrasing will make them go away.

Considering the outcome of the last presidential election, or attempt at same, in Afghanistan, it’s not surprising that Hamid Karzai’s challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, would balk at the idea of letting the same polling officials head the voting effort during the runoff slated for Nov. 7.

The first major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, passed last week, was attached to a measure funding ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If an athlete is caught cheating in the Olympics or another sports competition, that person is disqualified, and it is seen as a disgrace. In the case of the recent election in Afghanistan, however, cheating has been rewarded and even praised by no less than the president of the United States, says Link TV’s Jamal Dajani in this week’s “Mosaic Intelligence Report.”

Whoops! Some six years after performing his infamous “Top Gun”-inflected “Mission Accomplished” press stunt aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, former President George W. Bush let fly with quite a telling gaffe during a talk he gave Thursday to the Montreal Board of Trade.

Ballots are being distributed to voting centers throughout Afghanistan for the runoff between incumbent President Hamid Karzai and his top challenger from Round 1, Abdullah Abdullah, slated to take place on Nov. 7.

As Pakistan’s army continued battling militants in southern Waziristan on Tuesday, two suicide bombers set off explosions at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, killing themselves and four others and wounding 18, according to The Associated Press. Updated

Afghanistan will hold a runoff election on Nov. 7 after a U.N. commission stripped President Hamid Karzai of his victory, citing rampant fraud. Karzai, under heavy foreign pressure, accepted the commission’s findings Tuesday and agreed to the runoff.

The White House says it will delay a decision on sending more soldiers to Afghanistan until the U.S. can assess the new government, whose legitimacy has been in question since the August presidential election was marred by allegations of fraud.

Afghanistan may be nearing yet another political crisis as officials fear that President Hamid Karzai will not accept results of an investigation outlining massive fraud in the country’s presidential elections two months ago. The inquiry is expected to drop Karzai’s vote total to under 50 percent, requiring a runoff election.

After recent militant attacks in Pakistan that killed about 150, the Pentagon is pushing forward with plans to send about $200 million in military aid—in the form of equipment and “services,” according to Reuters.

Fox News personalities are so sensitive. After White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said that “we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave,” Glenn Beck grabbed his toys and declared war.

The death toll after four days of militant attacks in Pakistan rose past 100 following another deadly blast, this time in the Shangla district of the Swat Valley, where a car bomb exploded near a market early Monday afternoon.

After facing allegations of a cover-up, Kai Eide, the most senior U.N. representative in Afghanistan, acknowledged that “widespread fraud” has tainted the country’s presidential election but denied that he tried to hide evidence of cheating.

In Obama’s nine months as president, he has put U.S. relations with Russia on a more constructive course; has seen Iran agree to open its nuclear facility near Qom to international inspection; and, despite Israeli and Palestinian intransigence, has kept the two sides negotiating with America’s dogged envoy, George Mitchell, who helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.

The Nobel Committee has interrupted the president’s meditations on whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan by awarding him the Peace Prize. The committee cited Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and especially his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

While the Obama administration continues to mull over its options regarding America’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan, the United Nations Security Council has voted to urge “member states to contribute personnel, equipment and other resources” to the ongoing conflict.

In the left corner, we have filmmaker Michael Moore, taking his anti-capitalism roadshow to ... Fox News. On the right, we have anchorman Sean Hannity, eager to repeatedly point out how much money Moore makes. But does Hannity believe in conspiracy theories? This does get lively.

The U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years. To mark the anniversary, the Afghan Taliban asserted themselves via an Internet statement Wednesday, claiming they had—and have—no intention of attacking other countries, but they will continue to fight against Western colonizers as long as they occupy the country.

There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing al-Qaida back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.

It is not for McChrystal to leak his staff’s strategic plans to The Washington Post, do the celebrity circuit and tell the public in so many words that if he doesn’t have his way the United States can expect defeat and humiliation in Asia.

What’s the right way for a top general to advise the president about wartime strategy? What if his recommended strategy is potentially at odds with the president’s preferred course of action? Gen. Stanley McChrystal ran up against these questions in recent days, and not everyone in Washington thinks he handled his part in the matter appropriately.

Last week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal made his case, very directly and publicly, that the window of opportunity for “winning” in Afghanistan won’t be open indefinitely and that troop increases are crucial to that strategy. But is he right? Not everyone in or orbiting the White House these days is completely sold.

War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires.

In the 20th century, smallpox killed more people than all of that bloody century’s wars combined. It cost $300 million to eradicate the disease. What might have been achieved with the $4 trillion we gave Wall Street?

A former U.N. diplomat has attacked the process and results of the recent Afghan elections, claiming that almost one in three votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai was fraudulent and that the elections seriously weakened the democratic process in the eyes of the Afghan people. As a consequence, the Taliban is stronger, says Peter Galbraith, who was fired in a dispute over the voting.

That last bit in the headline isn’t just to get your attention—there are a few valid reasons for its inclusion among this week’s “LRC” topics (paging Roman Polanski ... or was that David Letterman?). However, more substantial fare precedes that part of the discussion, including talk of unemployment, Wall Street’s most wanted, and Obama’s growing Afghanistan problem.

International efforts to expand Afghanistan’s security forces are being undermined by “spiraling increases” in violent deaths among the nation’s police officers as the eighth anniversary of the U.S. war approaches.

While the Republican leadership in the United States would have people believe that the country is being remorselessly driven to the far left under Barack Obama, European voters are moving toward the right.

President Barack Obama is under major pressure to sort out the future U.S. commitment and plan of action in Afghanistan, and thus his work was cut out for him during his huddle Tuesday with NATO leader Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The Obama administration is reconsidering its Afghanistan strategy in light of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s startling “mission failure” warning. It’s unclear whether the White House will go along with McChrystal’s call for up to 40,000 more troops—but the general is apparently going to go ahead with his request over the next few days.